Fandom Thought of the Day #13--The Mummy: Mythology fail
So in The Mummy, Imhotep was tortured and buried in such a way that if he was ever resurrected, he would bring all the plagues of Egypt with him. One problem with this.
The punishment he went through, and the concept of magical resurrection, is a very pagan one. The punishment is a very ancient pagan one. (I have no idea if it's at all faithful to actual Ancient Egyptian culture or not, but considering it's Hollywood, I'm guessing not.) The plagues of Egypt are biblical.
Now, one could argue that the plagues must have happened in this universe, since Imhotep brought them back when he was inevitably resurrected. But the thing is, the plagues were the work of the Abrahamic God. The Egyptians had their own gods, ones who they would have been obeying by burying Imhotep in the way that they did. The Abrahamic God is such that His existence makes all other gods' existence either superfluous or impossible. But they must exist in this universe, because the Abrahamic God also doesn't give people the power to raise the dead, and He certainly doesn't leave a handy-dandy how-to book lying around for people to pick up and read. And if He did, those people reading it without even knowing what it meant wouldn't be able to bring back the dead.
So there's a problem with this universe. It has demonstrated that there must be two fundamentally incompatible religions that are both true. Supernatural got around this (in the most offensive way possible) by making all non-Abrahamic gods into high-ranking, flesh-eating monsters. The Mummy doesn't even try, because hey, it's a movie. No one said it needed to be good.
I'm sure there are plenty of disasters that happened in Egyptian mythology, and I know there are plenty of gods who would have been pissed at someone walking around alive again with that amount of power, spitting in their faces. Why didn't they do some research and pick one of those?
The punishment he went through, and the concept of magical resurrection, is a very pagan one. The punishment is a very ancient pagan one. (I have no idea if it's at all faithful to actual Ancient Egyptian culture or not, but considering it's Hollywood, I'm guessing not.) The plagues of Egypt are biblical.
Now, one could argue that the plagues must have happened in this universe, since Imhotep brought them back when he was inevitably resurrected. But the thing is, the plagues were the work of the Abrahamic God. The Egyptians had their own gods, ones who they would have been obeying by burying Imhotep in the way that they did. The Abrahamic God is such that His existence makes all other gods' existence either superfluous or impossible. But they must exist in this universe, because the Abrahamic God also doesn't give people the power to raise the dead, and He certainly doesn't leave a handy-dandy how-to book lying around for people to pick up and read. And if He did, those people reading it without even knowing what it meant wouldn't be able to bring back the dead.
So there's a problem with this universe. It has demonstrated that there must be two fundamentally incompatible religions that are both true. Supernatural got around this (in the most offensive way possible) by making all non-Abrahamic gods into high-ranking, flesh-eating monsters. The Mummy doesn't even try, because hey, it's a movie. No one said it needed to be good.
I'm sure there are plenty of disasters that happened in Egyptian mythology, and I know there are plenty of gods who would have been pissed at someone walking around alive again with that amount of power, spitting in their faces. Why didn't they do some research and pick one of those?